Community and Nation: Staging Queer Histories

Abstract

If the early years of consciously lesbian and gay performance in the UK were preoccupied with issues of authenticity and cultural representation, this chapter turns to locate contemporary traces of those concerns within traditions of autobiography, documentary and history-making. In particular, this discussion examines the relationship between queer performance and the discourses of community and nation — and the relationship of growing, increasingly identifiable queer communities to existing discourses of culture, history and heritage. In doing so, the following discussion builds on the analysis of claims to performative representation raised in the previous chapter’s examination of Gay Sweatshop in considering where specific performance conventions — and concurrent claims to authenticity — have emerged in relation to particular models of collaborative practice and creative agency. The engagement with autobiographical practice also signals a return to the dialectic of ‘telling and knowing’ raised in Chapter 1, and consciousness of where the desire to tell one’s own story may be understood as a response to specific cultural contexts and political ambitions, as a strategy of empowerment that may yet also threaten exposure. At the heart of that dynamic may be the relationship between individual and group biography; that is to say, the project of life story-telling within queer performance may be read, for example, in terms of individual empowerment and simultaneously as part of a broader attempt to identify, construct or preserve a lesbian and gay heritage.